Sins of the Father
by Eirian Erisdar
Summary: What if Claudia hadn't been able to heal Soren and instead brought him back home to the citadel? Viren hears the news from the depths of his cell and comes to terms with what he has done. Four or five-parter, with father-son angst and character studies.
1. Viren

**A/N: Another one so soon after _His Father's Back_? *shrugs* took an hour break from studying and the plot bunny got me from my twin, Waffles Risa. This will probably be a four to five-parter. Cross-posted to tumblr.**

* * *

**_Sins of the Father_**

_Eirian Erisdar_

* * *

In the end, they didn't even have the decency to tell him in person.

Viren was sitting perfectly still, head tilted back against the grimy wall with his chains pooling around his wrists and ankles, when he heard it: the careless, too-loud whisper of a guard come to relieve the previous shift. Guards lined the corridor every five paces, Viren knew.

"_Did you hear? His children have returned."_

Viren's next inhale caught in his chest, and he very nearly tilted too far forward in his haste to catch the next words; his chains clinked softly against each other, and he held his breath for one long moment, fearful that the sound might alert the guards that he was listening.

For a moment, the two helmeted shadows slanted along the faint candlelight outside the bars of his darkened cell were still.

Then, the sound of spittle hitting stone._"Pah! Weren't they sent out to seek the princes? What use was that? King Ezran was found and safely returned by General Amaya's soldier yesterday."_

Viren ground his teeth. The guards had fairly flung that latter piece of information in his face a day previous as they slammed down his tray of food.

One of the shadows leaned closer towards the other, conspiratorially. _"That's beside the point right now - scuttlebutt is fairly on fire up in the barracks. Rumour has it his lordship's children didn't come back…whole."_

And just like that, Viren forgot how to breathe.

_Not whole._

Not whole like he was, drained with magic and without access to the creatures he used to rejuvenate his appearance, or not whole as in…

And even as his heart paused before its next beat as though considering whether to go on, as the chains around his wrists and ankles grew instantly heavier - the question appeared before him.

The only question that mattered.

_Claudia or Soren?_

And perhaps, at this moment, if Viren had been allowed time to think, he might have shamed himself by entertaining the fleetest idea of a preference - but the guard had not stopped speaking, and the answer to the question was there.

"_They made quite the scene, apparently. I have it on the authority of the guard at the gate that the Lady Claudia galloped in like there were demons at her heels and didn't even dismount before she started screaming for her father."_

The second guard snorted. _"Fair chance of _that _coming to any use. What was she screaming for?"_

The next words would remain carved into Viren's memory forever - beyond the image of his wife's straight-backed form as she rode away to her homeland, beyond the horror in his heart when Queen Sarai's breath halted right before his helpless eyes.

"_Her brother. He took a dragon-tail to the chest and fractured his spine four days ago. He's paralysed. Can't even raise his head to drink."_

Viren jerked.

His chains clattered in an echoing cacophony across the grime-stained floor; there was a flurry of motion outside.

Viren halted, chest rising and falling in rapid, uneven breaths.

A moment of silence.

"_Do you think he-"_

"_Shh! Go, go. It's my shift."_

In the half-shadow of his windowless cell, Viren began to shake.

There was a roaring in his ears that was louder than the memory of Thunder's gaping maw descending on him and the late Queen; the grey-purple backs of his hands in the darkness, still blanched with the marks of dark magic, shivered in his gaze.

Soren was-

_His son_ was-

Claudia's lighthearted voice tumbled out of memory, a conversation in Viren's study which had taken place only a fortnight previous but seemed an age ago now, here in the dank shadows of this solitary cell.

_"Let's say we're attacked by giant bumble-scorps and they're all like bzzz! Bzzz! and flailing their scorps at us like bzzz! - and I'm forced to choose between saving the egg and saving Soren. What should I do?"_

Then, Viren had found himself momentarily speechless - he had looked from Claudia's dancing, joke-filled green eyes _(his former wife's eyes)_ and down to the carpeted floor, because she had, in the unassumingly brilliant way of hers, voiced the question he had refused to ask himself.

Claudia had laughed and poked fun at him for not recognising a joke when he heard it, but she had been only a dozen steps to the door when he spoke.

He had taken the guilt and the shame and compressed it into a sphere so tight beneath his sternum it burned, and made the decision for the good of Katolis.

Just as he had made the decision regarding Harrow's life, and later, to abandon the princes.

For the good of Katolis, and for mankind.

"_The egg,"_ he had said, with that firm, unyielding authority that he knew his daughter would understand. _"If you have to choose, choose the egg."_

What horror and sorrow had now bred from his words then?

What had he done?

_What had he done?_

Viren's blood flared to fire in his veins, and he scrambled forwards on his hands and knees even as a deep, warning hiss from the worm in his left ear whispered, _"Be still!"_

Four days ago he would have listened without question. Now, Viren raised his head and shouted with the barking, staccato voice of a throat completely dry:

"Guards!"

The clang of a spear against the bars of his cell. Contempt from the shadows of a guard's helmet. "Quiet, prisoner."

"_Still yourself and listen to me!"_ Aaravos's sly murmur hissed urgently in his ear. _"If you do not-"_

Viren wet his cracked lips with a tongue so dry it hurt. "Guards!" he snarled, voice snapping like his son's back must have, out in the wilderness against a dragon he was not equipped to fight. "I need to speak to Opeli!"

A guard's laugh reverberated down the half-light of the corridor. "Mere prisoners have no right to summon a member of the High Council at whim, no matter their station before their crimes,_traitor."_

Of all the words the guards could have chosen, that was the worst.

Traitor. _Traitor, _he who loved Katolis best - had sacrificed anything for his country and his people, and now had even sacrificed the happiness of his firstborn son.

Viren's snarl turned into a roar.

"_BRING HER TO ME!"_

He had no magic here with him, and the voice in his ear would not give it - but the words lashed out of him with such desperate power that for a moment he fancied that the walls shook and the flames of the torches wavered in the corridor.

A muffled curse outside the cell. The rasp of swords being drawn, steel-toed footsteps on the flagstones. A figure in the armour of the citadel guard, silhouetted before the bars of the cell.

"Lord Viren! This is your last warning! Quiet down or we will-"

Viren was straining at the very end of his chains now, and cared not that the taste of iron coated the back of his throat and that steel carved into his wrists and ankles.

"_I NEED TO SEE MY SON!"_

Whatever the guard did next Viren did not know. The world was spinning before his vision, and the drum of his heart in his head had drowned out all else.

Half-blind with desperation and shivering from unspeakable emotion, Viren laid down the last treasure he had reserved, even bound in the depths of the castle's deepest dungeons - his pride.

His head lowered to press into his hands, fisted in the grime of the sawdust floor.

The worm was still and silent in his ear.

"I need to see my son,"Viren whispered, with none of the fire of moments previous. "Please. Let me see my son."

Soren.

And there, curled in his uttermost fall from grace, Viren could only wait.

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I'll see when part 2 comes - I have _Waiting in the Quiet_ for all you gremaya fans and _The Silent Song_ to continue. Check out my tumblr for more TDP, and if anyone is interested in more about Soren, Claudia, and their father, _His Father's Back_ is a recent oneshot I posted to both tumblr and FFN. Thanks for reading, everyone, and reviews are good food!


	2. Claudia

**A/N:** Viren gets an unexpected visitor with even more unexpected revelations.

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_Chapter 2: Claudia_

* * *

"_Well, don't you look like something that came out of a banther's rear, Viren."_

At the voice – dry, even, and utterly placid – Viren looked up. His neck was screaming at him from long overuse curled over the filthy floor in supplication.

Opeli's grey steel circlet had always given her face a severe expression, but here in the half-light of the dungeons she seemed more statue than human; a bastion of the ancient laws of Katolis.

"Well?" she demanded, clear eyes glittering in the flickering torchlight. "Your guards say you have something to tell me. I'd like to think you'd have more reason to summon me than to gawp mindlessly."

In her eyes, Viren could see his reflection; his skin a ghastly blue-grey, streaked with bruised purples and ash in his hair. The scars of a lifetime of dark magic revealed at last.

It was a small wonder that she was so disgusted by him.

He inhaled through a mouth completely dry. Hands curling in the sparse sawdust of his cell floor, he pushed himself up – but not too far. Just so that he was kneeling with a straightened back instead of with his face pressed to the ground. It rankled him to have to kneel so – but he had laid down his long-reserved pride, now. He had no other recourse but to continue.

For Soren.

His heart twisted.

"Please. Let me see my son," he said, voice not quite pleading, but clear in his admission that there was nothing he could do but _ask._ Viren knew the usual intensity of his voice was tempered now with unavoidable exhaustion, from hours curled in supplication on the unforgiving floors of his cell.

Opeli's eyes flashed.

"Traitors to the Crown are not normal prisoners," she said, with the clear diction of one who had memorised the law from cover to cover. "They are not permitted personal visitors–"

"_Then bring me up to him,"_ Viren all but snarled, and reined himself back with difficulty as fear crossed Opeli's face and the metallic ring of armour sounded down the corridor.

He had to remind himself not to bite the hand that was feeding him. Not when it was the only way he could see his son.

"I…apologise," Viren ground out. "But my son. I heard he was grievously wounded. I must see him." He allowed some of the horror he first felt at the news he overheard to bleed into his words. Let his voice shake.

It terrified him to realise that part of that shaking was real. A visceral, uncontrollable denial of his own part in it – an emotion that he kept barely chained behind an iron will. The worm in his ear must have felt it, but no words of warning came.

Opeli's shoulders softened, if only for a moment.

"He is with the healers now," she said, with less heat than before. "I have been to see him. He is not in pain."

"Of course he's not in pain!" Viren barked, and his chains rattled in a cacophony that rung off the walls. "He can't _feel _anything!"

Opeli's eyes narrowed to slits. "I assure you he _can_," she growled. "There is more to a person than what four limbs can–" she inhaled sharply. Cut herself off and stared at the wall, brow furrowed in thought.

Viren repeated her words silently to himself, but he could not understand. It frustrated him to no end, so he settled for demanding again. "Let me see him."

"I've already told you, _no_," Opeli snapped. "The healers are doing all they can. When King Ezran processes your case, perhaps he will be moved to allow this mercy. Until then, you will remain here, as ordered unanimously by the High Council."

King Ezran.

An untrained whelp of a boy with a heart just as golden and eager to serve as his father before him.

It was what had gotten Harrow to this point.

But perhaps Ezran's soft heart would work in Viren's favour.

Viren bared his teeth. "Then I humbly extend my supplications to the King. May he in his graciousness extend mercy to the father of his friend."

Perhaps it would have worked more to his favour if he hadn't half-hissed that.

As it was, Opeli's lips thinned. She leant closer, until her face was barely two hand-spans from Viren's where he knelt before the bars of the cell with his two hands straining at the chains behind him.

"I know what you are attempting, Lord Viren," she said, utter contempt in her voice. "It will not work."

Viren spat in her face.

Opeli jerked backwards, white-sleeved hand going to her cheek.

A flash of glinting armour in the corner of Viren's vision, and the blunt end of a guard's spear lanced through the bars and buried itself in his stomach. He hunched over, gasping, as his stomach gave up what meagre prison breakfast he had had. It tasted vile – the bitterness of defeat and wounded pride, leaving behind growling emptiness and nothing else.

Opeli had cleaned her cheek. She was staring at him now as he retched, something akin to pity in her eyes.

Viren wanted to put out her eyes for it. He wanted pity least of all.

"You used to be better than this," Opeli murmured, quietly. "I remember you used to drink and laugh into the night with the King and Queen when they were Crown prince and princess. What happened to that young man with a love for history and lore? I saw you often enough in the great library when I was at my study of law and you at magic."

Viren laughed through the pain that clawed at his insides.

"What good did it do for Harrow, the law?" he scorned. And there, twisting harder in his stomach than the pain of the spear-end – the guilt of betraying a brother that he would never admit to himself.

Opeli straightened, a white-robed wraith in the torchlight.

"What good did magic do for you?" she said, and even as Viren's magic-twisted face snapped up to retort, she was gone.

She left Viren with a slow, secondary horror stirring in his veins.

He had forgotten Soren, as he had before, when he ordered him to kill the Princes and told Claudia to choose the egg over her brother.

He had begun this conversation for his son.

But he had ended it only for himself.

In that moment, of all the people in the world Viren hated, he hated himself most.

* * *

Three guard rotations passed; almost a full day by that reckoning.

Footsteps sounded down the corridor. The sound jerked Viren awake; he had been dozing fitfully with his head against the wall, the manacles around his wrists and ankles digging uncomfortably into his joints.

For a moment he did not move; but then he recognised the soft _clack-clack_ tread beside the stately stride of another, and he shifted urgently forward to the line of torchlight at the front of his cell. The worm shifted in his ear, but he could care less about Aaravos and his wiles at the moment; this was far more important.

And she came, black-robed, black-booted, with none of the exuberance of her usual air. Opeli halted beside her.

"Claudia," Viren breathed, and it was with the gentle, steady voice of fatherhood that he spoke: the voice he used to read his children to sleep when they were very young.

Claudia did not look at him. She was wearing the plainest robes she owned, with none of the hidden accessories that could be used for dark magic; her green eyes shimmered as they stared resolutely at the floor.

But her hair.

Opeli had already opened her mouth to speak, but Viren beat her to it; he stared with wide eyes at the strip of grey-white hair that framed Claudia's left cheekbone, and the words tumbled out of him in a rush.

"What did you attempt, you foolish child?" he all but shouted. "What was the first lesson I taught you? There are materials I told you never to use!"

Claudia flinched.

Opeli's mouth shut abruptly. She looked between father and child, and stepped back, just out of Viren's sight but very close to the cell itself.

Claudia was still staring at the floor. Viren inhaled unevenly, mind racing as he took in his daughter's appearance.

And then, just as suddenly, he realised how his outburst would have sounded to her.

"Claudia," he begain, quieter. "I'm not ang–"

"What did you expect, dad?"

The words struck him silent.

Claudia had raised her head. Her eyes stared through the dimness of the cell directly into his soul, burning, green flames the shade of his former wife's eyes.

"What did you expect?" Claudia repeated, and there was a bitter edge to her words that struck Viren more deeply than anything else could. "I had to do something, even if it didn't work! Did you expect me to just leave Soren be and sacrifice him for the dragon egg like you ordered me to?"

Opeli's intake of breath was sharp to the cell's left. Viren couldn't bring himself to care about that, not right now.

"I–" he began.

"Of course that's what you expected!" Claudia screamed, with such force that Viren knew that if she had magic in her fingers she would have brought down the dungeons on them all. "You don't care about anything except that egg and Xadia and that mirror! After all, _you ordered Soren to–"_

"_Claudia!"_ Viren warned, but his daughter had already cut herself off. She was staring instead at his face, properly now, in the poor light of the torches.

Viren watched the horror dawn on her young features and refused to feel disgust at himself.

"This," he said, quite evenly, as though he were teaching and nothing else, "is why I warned you to avoid certain materials for spellcrafting."

"Oh," Claudia said, faintly. One hand reached up to finger the white-grey strand in her hair. "I see." She was still staring at him. "And when…?"

"Many times," Viren said, quietly. "For Katolis, and for my king. And even for Duren."

Silence.

And then suddenly, with the abruptness that made Claudia _Claudia,_ she said, "Opeli tells me you asked to see Soren."

Viren could not quite keep his eagerness at that from trembling through his chains. "Yes," he said. "How is he?"

"He's alive," Claudia said. Her fingers twisted around each other in front of her, seeking rings that were not there. "He's no different. The healers say…there won't be much improvement. Ever."

Viren had expected it. The news still sank like a stone into his always-empty stomach.

"And do you know if I can I see him?" he says, instead, and the sentence is a litany by now, words so repeated they are almost like a poem.

"I have spoken to the King," Claudia said, and there was something in her voice when she said _the King_ that spoke of loyalty, already. "He has turned the decision over to Soren. And Soren has given me the final say."

Relief flooded Viren's limbs. Naivety in the young King was a blessing indeed. "Oh good, good," he said. "Then we should go now. I know I am filthy, but the sooner I am there the sooner we may find a way to cure–"

"The thing is," Claudia said, looking directly at Viren, "I'm not so sure seeing you would be a good thing for Soren."

A pause.

"Explain," Viren said, a dangerous note to his voice.

Claudia's gaze was steady, earnest, and completely unyielding. "I think you know why," she said, sounding so much like her mother did when she said _I'm leaving you, Viren_ that Viren nearly jerked back.

"Claudia, I don't have time to speak _Claudia_,"he said testily, and saw a flash of hurt lance across his daughter's eyes. "Speak plainly."

"Soren loves you very much," Claudia said, and Viren didn't understand why she was stating something so obvious – his firstborn was probably the most unsubtle being in the citadel.

"Yes, _and?_" he said, impatiently. He wanted to see his son. And now, when that goal was in reach, they were stuck here with him still in chains talking domestic matters. It was infuriating.

Claudia's green eyes shimmered with sudden moisture. "And there you go, dad," she said, hands curling in to fists at her sides. "This is why mother left you."

"_Excuse me?"_ Viren hissed. He thought he heard a dark chuckle in his ear, and fought the urge to slap Aaravos's worm out of his ear and be done with it.

"Oh, I'm not done," Claudia hissed back, something so howlingly sad in her features that it struck all the words from Viren's lips at once. "Soren loves you very much, Dad. But I don't think he knows you love him at all."

"That's preposterous," Viren growled. "I love you both equally."

Claudia looked at him with the same clear expression she had when she had worked out some difficult spellcrafting problem. "If you do, I don't see it," she said. "A bit hypocritical of me, being the one you love more. Or at least appear to, I don't know. But everyone knows you favour me. Not that it matters. You'd give us both up for the dragon egg, like you gave our mother up for Katolis."

"Both for Katolis and for humanity–"

"Right," Claudia interjected. "As you say. I was talking to Ezran, earlier, and something he said stuck with me. He says he doesn't think there's much _humanity_ in you if you would give up your family for power. I think I agree."

Viren stared up at her, still kneeling there in the sawdust.

"You owe Soren an apology before anything else," Claudia said, in that firm, blunt way of hers. "And you owe me one, too. And mother, but that can be done later. And then of course there's the late King, and the current one, and probably many more besides. Oh, and Opeli here, too. I heard the guards saying some of the things you said and did to her. It's not right. If Soren did any of those things when we were younger you'd have given him such a lecture."

Then she seemed to catch herself, and said, hands on her hips and quite steadily, "But you owe Soren an apology most of all."

Viren found he couldn't speak.

Then, suddenly, like the gale after the eye of the storm – "How could you abandon us like that, dad?" Tears leaked from the corners of Claudia's eyes. Splattered by her feet.

Looking at her, Viren found that he was _sorry._

So sorry he felt that the guilt was tearing him apart. Not for Katolis, but for his children, whom he had thrown away like pawns.

"Claudia," he said, voice cracking with emotion he would not let into his throat, "I am sorry."

"You should be!" Claudia yelled, very nearly stamping her foot, and Viren almost smiled at the image – the same picture she always presented when she demanded an apology from him, ever since she was a toddler. His smile was tempered, though, by the thought that this time his fault was so great he feared three words would never be enough.

But there was something else he had to do – Xadia and Katolis aside, for the first time in his life.

"Opeli," he said, softly.

Opeli stepped into his line of view.

"Might I see my son now?" he said, just as quietly.

Opeli looked to Claudia.

Claudia nodded, wiping tears from her face with the heels of her hands. Viren noticed her nails weren't painted, and that little detail – the pink ovals of her nails where they should have been her favourite purple-black – shook him more than he would have thought.

"Unchain him from the wall," Opeli directed to someone behind her. "Ready him to walk, but not run. Watch him carefully."

As the guards came in to bind his hands and his ankles together with a short length of chain and to undo the settings in the wall, Viren felt the worm in his ear shift.

"_Ah, and now an opportunity arises,"_ Aaravos's sly voice murmured, languidly, as though just awakened from a long nap. _"Strike when I tell you."_

Viren waited until the guards were busy coordinating who would hold the lengths of chain before muttering a reply under his breath.

"Not until I see my son," he hissed.

"_Very well,"_ Aaravos said, a trifle indulgently, like an adult allowing the whims of a small child. _"We shall see."_

"Not until I see my son," Viren repeated, but no answer came. And then the guard behind him shoved him forward, and he took his first step out of his cell on aching feet and knees, and he thought of nothing but his son lying in a convalescent bed, high in the Citadel above.

He looked down at his magic-scarred hands, and his lips thinned.

Viren had already resolved to heal Soren. No matter the cost.

* * *

**A/N:** Next up, Soren

Thanks for the reviews, favs and follows! I appreciate every one! 3


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